A decade ago, perhaps a little more recently, I received a phone call from Alaín Santana López, whose literary name is Milho Montenegro.
I don’t know who gave him my phone number and I was astonished to know that the purpose of his call was for me to give him my authorization to be included in a research on prison-themed poetry written in Cuba and to provide him with information about my work and person. Then he called me a few other times and we exchanged emails.
I was amazed by his idea of publishing a similar investigation in “La Gaceta de Cuba” and, since at that time my civil death had already been decreed, I warned him that I was a pariah, that I had publicly renounced my membership of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and was considered by that organization and by the dictatorship “a counterrevolutionary.” although I was and am quite the opposite.
I don’t know if he ever published that research in the UNEAC magazine. From a recent article by Luis Felipe Rojas, entitled “Why Did These Poets Go to Prison?”, I learned that Mihlo had published in Miami the anthology “From the Fold I Bramo. Cartography of Cuban Poetry on Prison Themes. 16th-21st Centuries”.
Beyond the formal errors that can be seen in the anthology – the most obvious of which is the inclusion of poems by Regino E. Boti, Juan R. Delgado Limendoux, José Manuel Carbonell, María Dámaso Jova, Manuel Navarro Luna, Juan Marinello and Rubén Martínez Villena in the section dedicated to the nineteenth century, when the poetry they wrote corresponds to the twentieth century – I consider it unfair to say that it is just another anthology. as someone did in a comment to Rojas’ article. In fact, this is the first approach made from Cuba to an issue that has been largely ignored by the official culture. I don’t know if a similar effort has been undertaken from exile.
That poets of the stature of Ángel Cuadra, Pura del Prado—with his shocking poem dedicated to Marcos Rodríguez and Jorge Valls—Heberto Padilla, Manuel Francisco Artime Buesa, Jorge Valls himself, Rafael Alcides, Fray Miguel Ángel Loredo and Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, to name just a few names that are not only part of our literature but also—for me more praiseworthy—of the frontal struggle against communism appear. it is a merit of Milho Montenegro’s research. The mere presence of these names in the anthology makes it unpublishable for the moment in Cuba.
What is unjustifiable is what Luis Felipe Rojas pointed out in his article, in that the anthologist offers information about the cause of the imprisonment of some poets while omitting it in the case of others. In the case of an anthology published in Miami, this attitude says a lot about the fear that permeates a large part of the Cuban intelligentsia.
I also think that the anthology would have been better if it had been restricted only to prison-themed poetry written from prison, not outside of it. But that’s a pending debt that Milho himself has, or a suggestion for other researchers. And that possible new anthology will have to go through an inevitable ideological demarcation. Fighting for communism is not the same as fighting for democracy.
What did Milho have done with the abundant information and documentary evidence I gave him about my first prison and about the political and social exclusion I suffered after it, which demonstrate the complicity of UNEAC at the provincial and national levels, including that of two of the anthologized Guantanamo poets? I don’t know. At least he published two of the poems I wrote during that ordeal, although they are not exactly the rebellious ones.
Milho did more than a certain researcher from Granma who, on a visit to Guantánamo, urged me for a copy of my book of poetry, taken out of bookstores by State Security along with a book of short stories by another writer from Guantánamo. Both were turned into pulp at the behest of Luis Antonio Torres Iribar, then the main leader in Guantánamo and current first secretary of the Communist Party in Havana. I had only three copies that had survived several records, something that, together with the fact that they would never be published again in Cuba, made them very dear to me. I don’t know anything about what that lady did with my book. At least Milho has anthologized a few poets excluded and anathematized by the official Cuban culture, including me, and I thank him for that.
In the prologue of my book “Written from Prison”, whose corrected and augmented edition was published by Editorial Neo Club Ediciones, Miami, in 2022, I wrote the following: “… I have remembered all the patriots who have suffered imprisonment and death for defending their ideals, especially the Cubans who lived the experience of Castro’s prisons in the first decades of the dictatorship and before whose courage, sacrifice and integrity, I bow with devotion and respect. If I was able to endure those years in prison, it was, in part, because I always thought about them. Someday the exiles will have to erect a monument where each of their names will be engraved.”
Some of those men who fought communism in Cuba with extraordinary civility and courage are poets and suffered repeated injustices for long years in the sinister prisons of the Castro regime, “when no one listened.” Everything indicates that poets who give virile – not servile – use to their voice will continue to go to prison, because the dictatorship has socialized the bars to the extreme.
How long will it take for this poetry to be available to all Cubans? I don’t know. I do know that no one could or will be able to silence those verses, inseparable from the suffering of the homeland, and that those poets, with their indomitable attitude, were not bent by bars.
That is why, beyond the criticisms and defects that may be made of this anthology, I am grateful for this effort by Milho Montenegro, who lives in Cuba. You can’t ask the elm tree for pears.
Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces
VISITATION
I imagine your scent amid the humidity
and the trails the insects leave on my walls,
traces of an extended night as I wait.
I imagine how you get dressed
You wake up the children.
You speak to me, and I hear your voice.
From the faces surrounding me on the breakfast line
I enjoy the tenderness you bring forward.
Sun veils seethe the moon fleeing in the morning.
From these prison bars that cannot hold my soul
I know you are coming.
Guantanamo Prison – September 30, 1999
FORGIVE THEM, LORD
Forgive my enemies, Lord.
Increase my strength like the land multiplies the seeds
and the sands dissolve in the desert winds.
So that my heart will open to the epiphany of forgiveness,
do it, Lord.
Bend my pride,
Subdue me like a reed to the waters’ might
Cut out the mildew that break the spikes of your love.
If hate fills my eyes, repeal it Lord,
Clean from it the cracks from my peace.
Forgive my enemies, Lord,
and for each bar that increases my pain, give them cause for joy.
Forgive them, because when for a bed
they gave me an iron bar held by chains
You brought me music through the wind and the scent of mangoes
through cruel concrete blinds.
Forgive them, because when they prevented me from embracing my parents
my siblings, my sons and my wife
I held my head high
but You lifted my soul even more.
When I spoke before the judges, You tempered my words
and when the truth was made into a sad exercise of justice
ordaining my exile from the streets and from those I long to see
You made me strong: I was imprisoned and now I am freer,
I was deprived from sunlight, and I have never had so much light
I was handcuffed, but my thoughts are free,
I was separated from my family, but our love is as deep as ivy.
For all I thank you, Lord, and ask you to forgive them.
I have You; They? Whom do they have? Whom do they love?
Whom can they call when they get lost in the nightmares of their souls?
For each blow they give, You will help me heal,
for each gash of darkness, You will make the light even brighter.
Even if they belittle me
silence me
break me
I will shout and will be upright like an obstinate loving spike.
Guantanamo Prison – October 25, 2000
- Translation: Dr. Vanessa Rouillon
Assistant Professor English
Bridgewater College, VA